Climate Solutions 2: Low-Carbon Re-Industrialisation - WWF Blogs

The growth of any industry follows
a typical pattern. It starts small, but
can grow rapidly. It is, of course, easy
to double in size when an industry is
small. But eventually the industry’s size
stabilises so that it is in equilibrium with
the size of its resource and/or market.
By way of example, the wind industry
started small and has grown quickly. At
some stage it will reach a state where
the industry has harnessed all of the
suitable wind resources, at which
point the industry will only be of a size
required to maintain and replace this
stock of power stations.
In terms of the trapezoid approximation
of industry growth (see Figure 11), the
progression of industry development
can be summarised into the following
phases:
1. The growth phase (also referred to
as the critical development period),
in which the industry growth is
accelerating towards the maximum
growth rate (i.e. in each successive
year more units are produced per
annum).
4. The decline phase, in which the
total size of the industry starts to
decrease (i.e. existing installed units
are taken out of service and not
replaced).
Each industry may have a different
industry growth profile depending on
the relative size of these periods. For
all emerging technologies examined in
this report, these are set at 0–20% for
the growth phase (critical development
period), 20–80% for the stable phase
and 80–100% for the saturation
phase. Nuclear energy is the only lowemissions
technology assumed to enter
into the decline phase prior to 2050.
These settings reflect the concept that
a participating company will want a
sufficiently long period of production
from an existing factory to recover the
investment, i.e. an industry will not keep
growing indefinitely or right up to the
point that a resource is saturated.
2. The stable phase, in which the
industry growth rate is constant and
the maximum number of new units
(m in Figure 11) are produced each
year.
3. The saturation phase, in which the
industry growth rate decreases and
fewer new units are produced each
year.
Climate Solutions 2: Low-Carbon Re-Industrialisation
17
Climate Risk